Mission for Career Development With Our Students

"It is never too early for elementary school students to hear about college and careers and to learn about the value of education."

Elementary school is also a key time to teach students that achieving their dreams requires hard work, including the pursuit of education beyond high school. Our responsibility as adults in the lives of children is to provide many and varied developmentally appropriate opportunities for career awareness, career exploration and the development of life/career planning skills. To be personally meaningful to children as individuals, the experiences must be accompanied by opportunities to express individual thoughts and beliefs as they develop.

For most children, their first awareness of careers develops from their immediate family members. A child whose mother is a nurse might want to be a nurse. A child whose grandfather is an electrician might want to be an electrician. This development of awareness is a positive step, and educators can help students deepen this awareness beyond their experiences at home. It is also an appropriate time for students to begin examining their own interests and developing self-confidence to achieve their future goals (even if those goals change many times). That's why it is important to include the whole family system in the career exploration of our students at Richland School District Two. Without your guidance and input, our students would not be here! You are an important part of the Career Team and the career process.

Together, we will work on creating structured environments for students to learn about careers by articulating what they like about certain careers, as well as interacting with professionals in those careers, provides an open knowledge base for children to begin to explore their own career development.